Windows 8 License Sales Cross 200 Million

Recently it was rumored that Microsoft is going to talk about Windows 9 at its BUILD conference presumably because it wants the next major Windows update to start fresh. Apparently it doesn’t want to launch it under the Windows 8 moniker due to the slow pace this particular iteration of Windows is moving at. While that is far from being confirmed, Tami Reller of Microsoft today revealed at a Goldman Sachs technology conference that Windows 8 license sales have now crossed the 200 million milestone.

Its quite evident that Windows 8 hasn’t been moving as fast as its predecessor. When Windows 7 had been out for an year, it had clinched over 240 million license sales. Roughly six months back Microsoft had announced that Windows 8 license sales stood at 100 million, so it essentially took another six months to double sales but was still slower than Windows 7. Obviously the slow pace can be attributed to declining global PC sales as well, though Microsoft hoped to counter that through its Windows powered tablets, but even they didn’t turn out to do spectacularly well. Before it formally starts talking about Windows 9, the company will first release Windows 8.1 Update 1. Even though several builds of the update have been leaked, its expected that quite a few more changes will be made to this update before its finally rolled out for end users.